The myth of Hercules is one of those fantastic jellybeans of world literature, a nasty, brutish, savage story full of monsters and gods and heroes, a rival to any of the cracking yarns from the Bible but without any hint of moral nourishment to weigh it down. In Greek tradition, the king of the gods, […]
The surprise 20-to-1 earnings-to-budget ratio of a little dystopian murderfest called “The Purge” last year made its spawn, “The Purge 2: Anarchy,” a foregone conclusion. What wasn’t inevitable was that the sequel would be a stronger movie than the original. Rather than pinning us inside a single McMansion during America’s newest/worst holiday, the annual 12 […]
Kevin Gillespie keeps collecting accolades. The Atlanta chef became a household name in 2009 when he became a finalist on Top Chef’s season 6. He was beloved that season as much for his humble attitude (more apparent considering it was such a sharp contrast with the eventual winner, the douchy
For a benefit concert that is only five years old, Music for Memories has been able to secure some pretty big-name talent. Lee Brice, Montgomery Gentry and Scotty McCreery have all taken the Country Club stage and, this year, it’s Cole Swindell’s turn to help raise money for the Jud C. Hickey
If you ever need a couple of hours of quality alone time, check out a matinee showing of “Hot Tub Time Machine 2″ the day of the Oscars. You won’t ever have this chance again, I’m afraid, given that there’s not a snowball’s chance in a hot tub that “Hot
“West Side Story” may be one of Debi Ballas’ favorite musicals, but there’s a good reason the Augusta Players haven’t staged a production of it in a very long time. “We did it 11 years ago,” laughed Ballas, director of the musical that shows this weekend at the Imperial Theatre, “and it took me
There are three things Tricie Scholer wants her restaurant to be known for, and the first should be obvious from its name. Tricie and her husband Jan have owned Wild Wing Cafe on Washington Road for almost 11 years now. That’s long enough for their son Daniel to become the general manager and
“The Matrix” is almost 20 years old now, a figure that seems longer when its shadow sits over the subsequent films by its writer/directors, Andy and Lana Wachowski. First there were the lackluster sequels, which arrived as a matching set of first-wave nostalgia in 2003. The
The Saturday night opening-weekend screening of “Project Almanac” was without a doubt the talkiest, chattiest movie I’ve ever sat through — and that’s a title that takes some serious wrestling to win, after something like 500 movies in theaters. I saw a “Friday the
The nonprofit TED has been holding conferences for 26 years and has given speakers of all kinds and from all fields a chance to give “the talk of their lives” in 18 minutes or less. In recent years, these TEDTalks have become increasing popular, so, naturally, the community was more than a
To Brandon Brune, artistic director of Les Chatons Noir young actors collective, “Book of Days” by Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson reminds him of another classic play… in an evil doppelganger sort of way. “In a lot of ways it’s similar to the classic ‘Our Town’ in that you have
It’s hard to evaluate “American Sniper” on its merits alone, without considering its subject, the late Chris Kyle. The sharpshooter killed something like 255 people in Iraq, a stupefying total for a single lifetime, even if you accept only the confirmed number of 160.
If you ask North Carolina’s Lauren Faulkenberry how she would describe herself and her work, the owner of Firebrand Press would have a difficult time choosing between author, artist or artisan. “I do feel like I’m kind of a mishmash of a lot of things, but I guess primarily I’d say artist or
Early in “Selma,” the story of the 1965 marches from that small Alabama town to Montgomery, we get a disagreeable meeting of two heavyweights. Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) welcomes Martin Luther King (David Oyelowo) into the Oval Office to dissuade him, maybe, from the next act of
If you didn’t know that Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, “Inherent Vice,” was derived from the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon, an author equally beloved and feared for the sprawl of his sagas, you could imagine its pitch meeting as Philip Marlowe meets the Big Lebowski,
At the end of a year that saw remakes of reboots and retreads of rehashes, a year of more ninja turtles and another Godzilla and a worse “Robocop” and all the rest, I found myself slinking into one of the only movies among the 50 or so I saw in theaters this year that wasn’t
Rarely can you call a 144-minute war saga that pits elves and dwarves and orcs and men and savage bat creatures anything other than “epic.” Yet in “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” director Peter Jackson closes his second Middle-Earth trilogy with so much
“Exodus: Gods and Kings,” the second big-budget Biblical epic of the year, demonstrates on multiple fronts why we need more big-budget Biblical epics. For one, the source material is some of the most fantastic stuff in world literature: The Old Testament wouldn’t stand as the
We’re giving away a pair of tickets to see Merle Haggard Saturday, January 24 at the Columbia County Exhibition Center. All you have to do to qualify is “Like” the Metro Spirit’s Facebook page. Friday (12/12) at 4 we will announce the first randomly chosen winner (on our Facebook page). Here’s
“The Theory of Everything,” the biopic about cosmologist Stephen Hawking and his first wife, Jane, works handsomely as a movie about a genius, one who tried to understand the universe at the deepest levels and then tell us about it in an airport paperback. Eddie Redmayne plays
From behind bars, one of the horrible bosses from the predecessor to “Horrible Bosses 2,” here a savage Kevin Spacey, asks the three dundering heroes at the center of these movies who, in fact, is the worse boss: him or them? He might be evil, yes, but early in the sequel, the
“Rosewater,” Jon Stewart’s uplifting directorial debut about solitary confinement, follows the capture and imprisonment of Maziar Bahari, a real journalist who was held on suspicion of being a CIA spy after the 2009 Iranian presidential election. The Canadian-Iranian reporter